(whatever you dream)

I convinced the Poetry Foundation to send me a poem every day–okay, fine, I’m not special, they’ll do it for anyone who goes to their website and signs up. Sometimes the poems they send are really dreary and sometimes they’re breath-catchingly amazing, because that’s how poetry works. They’re all different from each other because that’s how poetry works too. Some of them skip along rhyming and some of them wouldn’t be caught dead rhyming and some of them are about momentous matters of profound philosophy and some of them are about dogs digging up bones, or something. So far so good.

Then there’s Gertrude Stein. Tell me where she came from. I don’t think she paid a single ounce of attention to anything anyone else had ever said or done about poetry, ever, in the history of the world. She just amused herself tossing the language in the air…